Moral Injury - The grunts - Damned If They Kill, Damned If They Donít

this is a discussion within the Everything Else Community Forum; By David Wood
March 17, 2014
How do we begin to accept that Nick Rudolph, a thoughtful, sandy-haired Californian, was sent to war as a 22-year-old Marine and in a desperate gun battle outside Marjah, Afghanistan, found himself killing an ...

How do we begin to accept that Nick Rudolph, a thoughtful, sandy-haired Californian, was sent to war as a 22-year-old Marine and in a desperate gun battle outside Marjah, Afghanistan, found himself killing an Afghan boy? That when Nick came home, strangers thanked him for his service and politicians lauded him as a hero?

Can we imagine ourselves back on that awful day in the summer of 2010, in the hot firefight that went on for nine hours? Men frenzied with exhaustion and reckless exuberance, eyes and throats burning from dust and smoke, in a battle that erupted after Taliban insurgents castrated a young boy in the village, knowing his family would summon nearby Marines for help and the Marines would come, walking right into a deadly ambush.

Hereís Nick, pausing in a lull. He spots somebody darting around the corner of an adobe wall, firing assault rifle shots at him and his Marines. Nick raises his M-4 carbine. He sees the shooter is a child, maybe 13. With only a split second to decide, he squeezes the trigger and ends the boyís life.

Re: Moral Injury - The grunts - Damned If They Kill, Damned If They Donít

I read a book that a sniper that was in Vietnam wrote.

He said he was looking over a trail that the VC were known to use when he saw a boy about 13 years old pushing a bike that had AK-47s hanging from it.

He wrote that if it had been an adult he would have shot him without a seconds hesitation.

He didn't want to shoot the boy, but he couldn't let him deliver weapons that would be used to kill his fellow Americans, so he decided to disable the bicycle by shooting it, figuring the boy would run away.

So he shot the bike and as he was looking through his scope, he saw the boy pick up one of the guns and begin looking for where the shot came from, so the sniper said he shot him.